The Scroll and the Story of the Three Gorges

Abstract

It is possible to look at Chinese history—and there are some scholars who do this—as a tale of environmental battles. If you go into early Chinese society and politics, you'll find problems of overcoming the environment, as well as enormous feats of highly technical engineering, long before there were civilized societies in many parts of the world. One of the greatest cultural heroes in the early Chinese saga of its own history is a person who carved open the mountains and made way for the rivers. This was Yu the Great, not necessarily a historical figure, but one who stands in Chinese texts as somebody whose contribution to the country was tampering with and gouging out and rebending and reorganizing the spaces and the waters of China. The tumultuous rivers, their high siltation rates, the extraordinary dangers of navigating them—these have all been parts of China's long historical tradition.